This is off topic a bit, but it's too important not to share. T Boone Picken's plan to cut down on oil consumption within ten years. We really need to get behind this. It makes more sense than anything I've seen yet. Problem is the government will need to get behind it. With the federal government's normal foolishness in charge, everyone needs to buttonhole our congressmen to see this succeed.

I just finished the Adsense Code... yeah, yeah, I should have read it a long time ago.  Just too many things to do. Anyway, I found it rather informative. It's mostly about tweaking your ads to increase their clickthrough rates.

Joel Comm discusses a number of very informative and important topics that you should understand if you are using Adsense. Some of the things he covers in his book are:

• Using colors to increase your clicks
• How to maximize visibility and response
• Controlling ad placement
• Using the Google search box
• Using multiple ad blocks
• Writing relevant content
• Response tracking and testing.
• Do's and don'ts about Adsense

He has links to resources and tools, some free, some rather pricey. He has set up affiliate linking for most of them so he can get a piece of the action.

The price is right on this book.  If you can't find enough info on Adsense to get your 15-17.00 back, you are just not using Adsense.

Microsoft came out with some freebie software that is really handy.  It's called Folder Share.  You can synchronize folders from your computers on your LAN or even across the internet.

Not only can you share files with friends, or from your desktop to your laptop, but it makes a very nice backup system as a hedge against computer failure as well.

You can pick it up at https://www.foldershare.com/home.aspx.

I put a tutorial up at http://www.marketingideasandtools.com/website_development.html on how to create a website. It's primarily pointed at a beginner who wants to create a commercial site.

It goes through all of the processes you will need to work with.

• Choose a topic or niche
• Select a domain name
• Create the site blueprint.
• Purchase hosting
• Choose and HTML editor and other website tools.
• Create the look and feel for you website.
• Drive traffic to your website.
• Monetize your website.

If you're trying to get going in internet marketing, but the website thing is beyond your ability, check it out.

http://www.marketingideasandtools.com/website_development.html

If you are setting up a web site to market a product on the Internet, one of the first things you should do is define the niche you will focus on. Is is important that you choose a niche that is small enough that you won't have to compete with large companies. On the other side, it has to be large enough to attract a reasonable amount of traffic.

The first thing to do is brainstorm to get a few ideas to explore. You just need a few, say half a dozen. After you gather up a few ideas, you will need to do some keyword research on your topics. Pick topics that you are interested in. Things you have a passion for. It is much easier to write great content when you are passionate about the subject.

You can do keyword research to help choose your topic. There are a number of ways to do keyword research, some for free, some not. You should start by creating an Adwords account at Google. Even if you don't intend to do pay per click (PPC) advertising, the tools available there can give you a lot of information as to the popularity of niche you are researching, and it will show how heavy the competition for the keyword will be as well.

After you get your Adwords account setup, login and click tools/keyword tools. Then you can enter a keyword or keyword phrase that you feel represents your topic. Google will generate a list of keyword that are relevant to your topic.

You can see there are 3 columns to get an idea of how your keywords will work. First, if they have high competition, will be difficult to achieve highs rankings, or affordable PPC. Lower competition with adequate search volume is what you need to look for. Choose a topic with lots of keywords that have low to medium competition, and have decent popularity.

Clickbank is another useful resource. Here is an example of an affiliate product that you can sell.

You can sort the products by popularity, and see the statistics for products close to your topic, even if you don't wish to market these specific products. A high gravity (grav) suggests a very popular product. This can give you a general idea of how popular your topic is.

Your topic needs to be in demand. A reasonable number of people must be searching for information in your topic. If it is too narrow, there will not enough interest in your topic.

Your topic cannot be too broad. A broad topic will have huge competition. The competing web sites are too numerous. Also broad themes will have major companies competing for the niche. A tight niche, even though it has good demand will have less competition. The big companies will find it too small to mess with, that makes it just right for the little guy to rank their pages in the search engines, or afford the PPC. You will get highly targeted traffic that tends to be easier to sell that broad untargeted traffic.

Your niche must have high return on investment (ROI) possibilities. You should have multiple ways to make a profit from your site. If you take some time and planning at this stage, before you are committed to building your site, you will be able to hit the ground running when you actually begin marketing your site.

I've setup a basic instruction manual for creating a web site to market a product. You can find it at http://www.marketingideasandtools.com/website_development.html. If you're a beginner, you should find it helpful.

I just noticed a post on Rosalind Gardner's blog where she lost a big post by inadvertently deleting it. Another reason to post to your blog with Live Writer. It works very well, has automatic spell checking, auto-saves your drafts, and is very easy to setup and use.

You can get it at http://get.live.com/writer/overview totally free. It's beta software, but it works quite well.

I just read a really great article on squeeze pages at StomperBlog.com. Truly a must read for anyone building an email list.

Andy Jenkins goes into an interesting discussion a method he calls a reverse squeeze. Rather than requiring the email address to get the bonus or product, he freely offers the prize first, and then asks for the opt-in.

I'm having some difficulty with one of my Adwords campaigns. After being online for 4 months, and having just begun going profitable, Google raised the minimum bids to $10.00 from $.05-$.50. It looks like there was a technical glitch in the linking that may have caused the problem, but I won't be able to tell until Google crawls it again.

Well, when this happened, I emailed Google support. It truly amazed me at the incompetence of the support personnel. After waiting 5 days for their response (they say on their web site it is usually within one business day), I received a generic email pointing me to the help area in Adwords. It was obvious they had never even looked at the site.

I responded by asking for a more specific answer to the problem. They came back with a detailed analysis that Google didn't like the business model because this was a review site. Of course there are thousands of review sites using Adwords all over the Internet. This might cause a small increase, but shouldn't cause this kind of slam.

I responded by focusing on some specifics of his answer. Then it got complicated. The person that was handling my case got sick and they moved it to two others. The first told me I didn't have a positive ROI, and didn't see that I had not enabled conversion tracking. He later emailed back and apologized. A complete waste of time.

Then I received an email from another support person who told me that I hadn't included my billing information, and that is why the ads weren't showing. I responded with an email that explained I had already spent $3000.00 over the last 4 months, and that most of my campaigns are running just fine. I can't wait until I see her response.

In over a decade on the internet and 2 decades working with computers, I have seen some bad support. This may well be the worst ever. One would think a company the size of Google would hire people that were basically competent. I'm sure there will be more to come on this debacle.

Since I'm using Yahoo ads, this is of particular concern to me. Yahoo's search results will contain Google's Adsense ads alongside Yahoo's results. I assume this will bounce Yahoo's ads on the pages that will be server. The test will include 3% of search results and will apply to US traffic, and the extended network will not be affected.

One thought that occurs to me is that Yahoo may be poking a stick in Microsoft's eye, perhaps to get them to raise their bid.

Learn about it here. The war continues.

http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/zdnet/microsoft/~3/267242184/

According to the BBC, a study by a US team for the Journal of Neuroinflammation, has shown that caffeine may cut the risk of dementia by blocking the risk cholesterol can inflict on the body. UK experts said it was the "best evidence yet" of coffee's benefits.

While the study is about rabbits, and how a barrier between the brain and their main blood supply was protected when they were given caffeine supplements, all the programmers out there living on their coffee, can rest a bit easier.

Part of the Google purchase of DoubleClick was the Performics division. Performics provides Search Engine Marketing (SEM), Search Engine Optimization services (SEO), and also runs the third largest affiliate network on the internet.

Google didn't want to get into a conflict of interest situation with a company working on SEM and SEO. Google announced they are splitting the company into two pieces. They are selling the SEM/SEO part, and keeping the affiliate marketing part.

Looks like Commission Junction, Pepperjam, etal. have reason for concern.